Transforming Your Brand: Marketing Insights From George Pino, Real Finds Podcast #24 Transcript
Gordon Lamphere: Hi, I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast, the podcast series where we interview key entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists who are shaping real estate and, as a result, our world. George is Chief Executive Officer at Commercial Brokers International and founding partner of Pono Asset Management, based in Los Angeles, California. On the podcast, we dive into commercial real estate auctions, the evolution of real estate marketing, effectively using social media to get eyes on assets, how to educate the consumer, and how to add value online. It’s well worth a listen. George, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today.
George Pino: Thank you for having me, Gordon.
Gordon Lamphere: Before we start, can you introduce yourself to our audience?
George Pino: Absolutely. George Pino with Commercial Brokers International. I’ve been in real estate for 35 years and have owned my own company since 2006 with a business partner. We’re a smaller full-service brokerage firm out of Los Angeles, about fifteen agents all in. We do all aspects of commercial real estate, and we also have an investment company.
A Fluke Start in Real Estate Auctions
Gordon Lamphere: How did you get into the real estate business? I was dragged in a couple of different times. I’m a fourth-generation broker. What got you into real estate?
George Pino: A fluke, to be honest. I started off doing real estate auctions for a company called Kennedy Wilson. At the time, they were the largest real estate auction company in the world. I’d just gotten out of college, and a friend of mine was working there on the transactional sales side. They asked if I had some time in the summer and wanted a quick summer job. I said sure. About a month in, they offered me a full-time position. There’s much to be said for being young and dumb, not knowing much about the industry, and jumping in full steam ahead, feet first, and never looking back. Within a few years, I was running their closing department, overseeing a team of eight people looking at all the closings. We were doing thousands of properties a year around the country. Then in 1993, we broke off and started our own real estate auction company with a gentleman named Fred Sands here in California. In about a year and a half, just from going after business development and pushing it forward, we became the number two real estate auction company out here. From there, we were offered a position to start a commercial real estate brokerage arm for a residential firm, and we did that until they sold to Sotheby’s, and then we decided to break off on our own.
How Real Estate Auctions Work
Gordon Lamphere: I want to follow up on real estate auctions, because there’s a lot of confusion, even among sophisticated commercial brokers, about how the auction process works. I’ve bought things at auction for folks, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert. Can you tell us how the auction world works?
George Pino: The auction world has changed quite a bit from when I was doing it. Originally, we did a lot of what we call open outcry auctions. We’d come into a market, blast out that a property was for sale, and use a minimum bid scenario, so people knew that if the bid was at that price or above, it would sell. Typically we marketed it so the minimum bid was about sixty percent of actual value. That generated a lot of interest, and the next thing you know, people are bidding against each other. We had a very small fallout ratio, because if someone tried to retrade during escrow or due diligence, we could say, we have a backup buyer who was only a thousand dollars off you. If you want to move forward, let’s move forward. If not, we’ll go back to them. That gave us a much higher percentage of closings. And surprisingly, a lot of times we’d sell the property for more than they could have bought it for before we took it to auction, just from the demand we created through marketing. That’s one of the key things a lot of people forget: any real estate agent is really first and foremost a marketing company, or should be. A lot of agents forget that.
Gordon Lamphere: A lot of our investors have primarily bought land at auction, since unless you’re dealing with a Superfund site, land is a little less complex. How does the retrade process typically work for buying at auction? For buildings, I imagine it gets complicated.
George Pino: I think it’s a lot simpler. It’s like any other transactional deal. The retrade typically happens during due diligence, but most of the due diligence was done up front. Before they could bid, buyers would get a booklet a good four or five inches thick with all the due diligence items, and they’d waive inspections and due diligence. Everything was up to date: title, environmentals, whatever third-party reports we thought might be needed. Having it all done up front took away the reasons to retrade. But people would still try.
The Evolution of Real Estate Marketing
Gordon Lamphere: A little less scary than I imagined. You mentioned marketing. So many of us in real estate, if we’re brokers first, we’re definitely marketers second. How have you seen real estate marketing evolve over the last decade? I’ve been in the business longer than my age suggests, but I’m still a millennial. Has there been a substantial evolution, and how has it influenced the way you market properties?
George Pino: Number one, huge evolution, just in the last ten years or so, especially in commercial real estate. Commercial real estate historically has been an old boys’ club. A lot of transactions were done by people you knew, off market. We always felt that wasn’t in our clients’ best interest. The bottom line we learned from auctions is that if we get more eyes and more people through the property, we create demand, and by the basic laws of supply and demand, if demand goes up and supply stays the same, prices go up. So we really started embracing it. I think we were one of the first companies to look at SEO work and rework a lot of the back end. Right now we have thirty-seven five-star Google reviews, all organic. All our SEO and marketing on that side is organic. We don’t pay for ads.
Where we’ve seen the biggest change is that a few years ago, we had this little thing called the pandemic, and everybody was locked up. There were a couple of apps out there, mainly Clubhouse, and a group of real estate agents around the country, thirty or forty of us, started talking on Clubhouse about deals and how they were working. We thought, we can actually use this, and started doing a lot more Instagram, videos, shorts, and YouTube. On average, we’re bringing in five to six leads a week just from social and organic marketing. Obviously the majority of leads are junk, but out of those, we still get one or two really good ones. For what I specialize in, I do probably two to three extra sale transactions a year just from YouTube videos. So it’s changed quite a bit, and we’re starting to emulate on the commercial side what residential is already doing. We’re seeing better production value, companies investing in everything from gimbals for agents to take on property tours to lapel mics.
The issue on the commercial side is that a lot of the larger companies like to oversee everything and don’t like agents marketing themselves that way, because they have to approve all the marketing that goes out. So it’s slower for the larger companies to take advantage of this. Meanwhile, smaller companies can react quicker. I come from a military family, so bear with me: battleships don’t turn on a dime. They’re big and powerful and get the job done, but they don’t turn on a dime. A PT boat or a destroyer can make quick adaptations and course changes and still be just as effective, just more maneuverable.
Getting Google Reviews
Gordon Lamphere: I want to touch on that later, but you mentioned Google reviews. We have about twenty authentic Google reviews, and we’ve found that a challenging part of the business. We have a lot of happy clients, but it’s been like pulling teeth. How have you gone about that?
George Pino: When I do sales training, one of the first things I tell agents is, if you never ask, you never get. You can’t assume clients know what you want from them. So we take a proactive approach. As soon as the deal is done, we ask, do you mind writing a review for me? Here are the links. We try to make it as easy as possible. We want them to write the review themselves, but we don’t want them searching for where to put it. We know how the SEO works, so we put the link that’s searched most and brings up our SEO the most as the first link, assuming they’ll only do one review, which is human nature. Even then, we only get maybe ten to twenty percent of the people we ask to actually do it. People say they will and never get around to it. But we’ve been proactive about asking, and if you ask, you may not get it every time, but it comes back to you eventually.
Small, Medium, and Large Firms
Gordon Lamphere: That’s something we need to implement more. Going back to the battleship and destroyer concept, how have you seen the marketing evolution differ between large, mid-size, and small firms? I have an absolute blessing because I run our marketing and sales team, and I have one owner to answer to for our social media program, and because of the success, I pretty much get deference.
George Pino: At small firms, the evolution happens a lot quicker because they can easily adapt. At larger firms, where they’re bringing in technology is not so much for agents and marketing, whether that’s ChatGPT or video channels, but for what adds value, or looks like it adds value, to their client, the landlord or seller. Companies like Matterport that do 3D mapping for office suites, making it easier to tour. It’s not so much marketing as embracing technology to make things easier or look better for the client. Some of the larger companies, or at least teams within them, are starting to embrace the marketing we’re seeing now, but it’s watered down because it goes through multiple layers of bureaucracy. Meanwhile, smaller and even medium-sized companies can change and adapt quickly. We have an affiliate network across twenty-seven major metros, and we’re helping affiliates, some our size, some with eighty or a hundred and twenty agents, with their marketing. There’s a real desire; a lot of people just don’t know who to hire or what to do.
For instance, we didn’t hire traditional real estate marketing people. We originally brought in a person with a master’s from USC in the applied psychology of marketing, so we could understand how what we do, where, and how affects the psychology of the buyer. When video started taking hold, we brought in a marketing person from HBO, so we had a lot of video ideas and editing. We take what’s happening in different industries and bring those professionals in to up our game. We’re members of the Commercial Real Estate Influencer Summit, which was created by a chairman at Cushman in Atlanta, and my business partner actually heads marketing for it. So a fourteen-agent company is putting out content for a summit created by someone at a much larger firm, and I think we do it a little better, with more creative ideas, because we can work around the guidelines rather than going through a big marketing team.
Gordon Lamphere: You brought up Ken Ashley. I drove him to the airport once when he came to Chicago. I went to hear him speak, he needed a ride, and he was a wonderful guy. I can’t speak highly enough of him.
George Pino: Absolutely. And that man never stops working. I wish I had his energy. He’s only a little older than I am.
What Makes Good Real Estate Content
Gordon Lamphere: I read a Harvard Business Review study about what Elon Musk did at Tesla. The question was whether to hire a CTO from Ford or GM, and he hired from Google, because he didn’t want to be like the traditional car companies. He wanted to be where the future is going. What I’ve seen from folks in the real estate influencer world is that they’re not hiring traditional marketers or using traditional techniques. You can say whatever you want about the effectiveness of your CBREs, Cushmans, and JLLs, and they’re great firms, but they’re marketing like it’s still the 1980s and 1990s, putting out press releases, and it lets down their agents, because it’s fifteen years behind the times. George, what is good, influential real estate content?
George Pino: When it comes to influencer real estate content, you have two issues. One is the influencer who’s all about look at me, look at what I’ve done. It doesn’t bring any value. What we advise our agents and work on with our marketing team is how to bring value, whether through education or otherwise. Yes, it’s good to toot your own horn when a deal closes, but nobody wants to see that on every post. And if you’re posting a closed deal every week, you don’t have to worry about your social marketing as much. So how can we help educate the buyer, convey what to do and how, and let them decide, this is a little too complicated for me, I should reach out to the person who talked about this?
Way back, when we opened a commercial division for a residential firm, one reason they brought us in was that residential agents kept trying to do commercial deals and getting sued. The owner said, give a class on commercial real estate, but make it so difficult that nobody ever wants to touch it. There’s truth in that, because there are so many small details we deal with as transactional brokers every day, and no deal is ever alike. It comes down to the experience we bring. Going into some of those difficult deals in your content highlights what a potential client should look out for, but they also see a professional who can mitigate their risk. It becomes cross-marketing where you’re giving value and letting them make the decision, which is a far more powerful lead, because they’re reaching out because they want to work with you.
The California Market
Gordon Lamphere: Before the Final Four, a lot of changes are happening on the ground in our markets. Can you give us a tidbit forecast on California? This will be released in three or four weeks, so give us the forecast rather than today’s news.
George Pino: That’s the lucky part about commercial real estate. It doesn’t move that fast unless there’s an emergency, like 2008 when the debt markets crashed. Right now, I feel good about the market. We’ve seen a slowdown in the number of transactions, but a lot more people are stepping back up to the plate. We’re starting to see office deals, which have been dead for a year and a half. Certain submarkets, like north downtown LA, have gotten very popular. Demand has increased as people move out of the traditional financial district, where there are more homeless issues down by Crypto.com Arena, and north toward Bunker Hill. Retail is going gangbusters. Bad news sells, so you have to take the headlines with a grain of salt. A couple of weeks ago, there was a big article about 5,500 retail store closures nationally. What it didn’t say is that 9,900 store openings were announced, almost double. Investors are still there. We’re seeing a lot more cash deals because of the debt markets, but deals are still happening.
Gordon Lamphere: In Chicago we’ve seen moderate downsizing in office as people move to more flex, though when the Wall Street Journal and New York Times ran the “is office dead” headlines, you think, come on. We’ve seen a lot of growth in small to mid-size offices, threes and fives, family and regional offices, and a bit of hub and spoke. LA is famous for traffic. Are people going closer to home, or is it a general smaller shift?
George Pino: In the Southern California and LA marketplace, it’s a smaller shift. There’s some downsizing, and more availability from sublets and consolidations, but we’re also seeing new companies come in to backfill space. A company took 60,000 square feet in downtown LA just last week. Each submarket within the city is different. South downtown LA has one of the highest vacancy rates right now. West Hollywood is above twenty percent on the retail side, some of the highest they’ve experienced, and that goes hand in hand with politics. West Hollywood has the highest minimum wage, twenty to twenty-five percent higher than the next highest in LA, so companies are moving to a bordering area just to save on taxes and employment costs. Overall, I still feel good about it. We’ve always done well in what are considered down markets, whether the mid-nineties in California or the late 2000s. A lot of that is because many agents don’t have the training or experience for what to expect or how to plan. Companies train for real estate, but they don’t train for the mentality of being an agent, where it can be feast or famine. A lot of younger agents leave the business because they spent every dime for two or three years, and when it dries up, they’re looking for a paid job. Companies should be looking at how to help agents weather the storm, through passive income, investments, or expanding their pipeline.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve seen the same thing at our firm. As a fourth-generation real estate person, I’m a big saver. My wife jokes that I save way too much money, but when the lean time comes, it’s nice to be ready. A lot of agents came up in this Goldilocks period of the last ten years when money was free, and we’re going into leaner times. If you didn’t save for colder weather, it’s going to be difficult.
The Final Four
Gordon Lamphere: We’re about to get into our Final Four, and we’ll have to ask for some predictions. Thank you for hopping on so far, and we’ll have you on again. First: where do you see the market going in the next ten years? It could be a segment or the whole real estate world.
George Pino: For infill areas and cities, we’re already seeing a lot of mixed-use projects, and it’s going to be more geared toward living and working in the same area. We talked about traffic. I know people who live in their bubble of Brentwood and Santa Monica and won’t go east of the 405, south of the 10, or north of Mulholland, so they miss out on a lot. That also brings opportunity for businesses, especially retail. If you have a great restaurant in downtown LA, it’s easy to open a sister restaurant on the West Side without cannibalizing. We’ll see more pseudo-chains, nicer boutiques and restaurants opening multiple locations within their metro without becoming a real chain. There’s also a big push, in California and Chicago, for converting downtown office to housing. It’s a potential, but it won’t happen for five to ten years, because of the logistics. The cost of a high-rise office building already puts you in luxury housing, and then there’s the conversion cost, because most office buildings don’t have the plumbing, gas, or electrical systems for bathrooms and kitchens. So it won’t help much with the housing crisis, especially lower-income housing. Until the government makes it affordable by cutting permit costs and streamlining adaptive reuse, I don’t think we’ll see it beyond a handful of luxury projects.
Gordon Lamphere: A couple of developers working on possible San Francisco projects said one of the biggest hang-ups could be reassessment. California has a unique tax system that keeps older values down, and values jump after redevelopment. Is that something California might reevaluate, or is it something developers will have to negotiate?
George Pino: I think it’s something the state and the city should do. With Prop 13 in place, properties aren’t reassessed until a sale happens or major work is done. When developers file permits and start major work, they get hit with a higher property tax cost while taking on the risk of a bet that people want to move into a mixed-use office-and-residential building. That’s going to take government action, and it’s one of the key steps needed for developers to step in. You’re absolutely correct on that.
Gordon Lamphere: We’ve been Nostradamus for the last couple of minutes, so let’s step back. George, looking at young George leaving high school, what would be your one-minute spiel of life advice?
George Pino: This has nothing to do with real estate, and it’s what I’ve told my kids from early on. When I got out of high school, my parents wanted me to be an engineer. I started as a computer science major, realized I didn’t want to sit in an office coding all day, and went into business because it gave me the most viability to go into almost any field. Even then, I got into real estate by fluke. So what I’ve told my kids is: find what you really love to do and do it. Don’t worry about what other people think, and don’t worry about the money necessarily. It’s always a factor, but if you’re doing something you absolutely love, you’ll make the adjustments, and if you do something you love, you never work a day in your life. My son wanted to be a pilot from a very early age, and he’s now a pilot for Republic Airways. My daughter wanted to go into forensic psychology, and she’s getting work experience before her master’s, though it’s changing a little because she’s a therapist for autistic children and loving it. So find out what you love. If you’re in high school, actually think about it, and go do it. Don’t be afraid. Dance like nobody’s looking. Have fun and enjoy what you’re doing.
Gordon Lamphere: Phenomenal advice. One way we get advice is through books. I’m a voracious reader of business and philosophy. Is there a book that’s influenced you or your career that you’d recommend?
George Pino: A few, but the one I just read is Question Based Selling. It’s really key for salespeople, because salespeople tend to be outgoing and talk a lot, in case you couldn’t tell, and a lot of times they talk about themselves and don’t listen to what the client is telling them. It’s all about asking questions, sitting back, listening, and leading the person down the path to the sale.
Gordon Lamphere: Wonderful advice. There are so many folks who talk too much and should just be asking questions, at least asking why. The reason we started this podcast is to reach out to individuals like you who are influencing the real estate market and gain insight into where it’s going. Before we end, and I’ll hold you to it, who’s the next person we should bring on?
George Pino: There’s a young lady who’s president of Lee & Associates in San Francisco, Jessica Mauser. She’s one of the smartest people, especially when it comes to the Bay Area, and not just her asset class. She’s the epitome of what a broker should be. You can talk to her about industrial, and she doesn’t do industrial, but she knows everything going on in the market. That’s how you add value to clients: understanding what the other asset classes are doing so you can play off that and open up in those areas. She puts out some pretty good content when she gets to it, and I say that only because I think there are six kids and three cats.
Gordon Lamphere: I’ve got a little one on the way, and I can only imagine, so I’m never going to throw shade on any broker with a large family. The last question, the second most important: if someone listened and wants to reach out, what’s the best way to contact you?
George Pino: The easiest way is email: [email protected]. Pino is like the wine, but with no T. An odd, short Italian name.
Gordon Lamphere: George, thank you so much for hopping on the podcast today, and we’ve got to have you on in the future. Thanks again to George. We appreciate his insights. If you enjoyed the podcast, please give us a like, a five-star rating, or a review. Your comments, interactions, and subscriptions truly matter and help us continue to provide quality guests. You can follow us on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. I’m Gordon Lamphere with the Real Finds Podcast. Thank you for listening.
Van Vlissingen and Co. has been the Midwest’s oldest commercial real estate brokerage, development, and management firm since 1879, and today is independently ranked the #1 commercial real estate agency in Chicagoland, home to the #1 independently ranked agent, Gordon Lamphere, and the region’s #1 ranked commercial property management team. If you own, manage, or invest in energy-adjacent, mixed-use, or transit-oriented property across Lake County, the North Shore, the Northwest and O’Hare corridors, DuPage and the I-88 corridor, Will County, or southern Wisconsin’s Pleasant Prairie, Kenosha, and Racine markets, contact Van Vlissingen and Co. at 📞 847-634-2300 or 🌐 vvco.com. For a market-wide view of where these dynamics sit today, see our State of the Chicagoland Commercial Real Estate Market for Q3 2026.